This article was taken from the June 2011 issue
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Andy Rubin needed a hit. It was January 2009, three years since
Google had
bought the company he cofounded, a little startup called Android. Rubin had
created a slick operating system for mobile phones that allowed
customers to surf the web, send email, play music and install apps.
He had hoped Google's money and power would help to turn Android
into a major force in the burgeoning smartphone industry. Instead,
Android had been a disappointment. Despite months of press
build-up, the first phone to run the system, HTC's T-Mobile G1, was greeted with tepid reviews and
lack-lustre sales. Rubin had tried to find a bigger telecoms
carrier that would agree to partner Android -- he and his team,
including Android cofounders Rich Miner and Nick Sears, had lobbied
Verizon for the better part of a year -- but without success. And
then there was Android's biggest competitor, the iPhone. Introduced
in 2007, it had become an instant commercial and cultural
phenomenon. Unless Rubin could come up with a breakthrough Android
phone, and quickly, he might have to concede the entire business to
Steve
Jobs.

Fortunately for Rubin, Sanjay Jha was in just as dire a position. Jha, the new co-CEO
of Motorola, had
been talking to Rubin for months, hoping to persuade him to let
Motorola build the next Android phone. Once the dominant
mobile-phone maker in the world, Motorola hadn't had a major
success since the Razr -- in 2004. Jha had been hired in August
2008 to resurrect Motorola's handset business and he had pursued an
all-or-nothing strategy, laying off thousands and betting
Motorola's future on his ability to build a hit Android phone.

Now Jha had come to Google headquarters to unveil his design --
and it was impressive. Jha promised a device that would be far
faster than any other smartphone. He said its touchscreen would
have a higher resolution than the iPhone's. He said it would come
with a full keyboard, for customers who didn't like the iPhone's
virtual keys. He promised a phone that was thin and sleek, one that
could compete with the iPhone on pure aesthetics. And, thanks to
his longstanding relationship with Verizon, he offered the
potential of a partnership with the US's then second-largest phone
company; in fact, Motorola and Verizon had already discussed
building a smartphone together. "We were all kind of jazzed," says
Hiroshi Lockheimer, one of Rubin's chief lieutenants, who was at
the meeting. "I think we said OK on the spot."

But that optimism faded a few months later, in the spring of
2009, when the first prototype arrived in the Android offices. To
Rubin's eyes, they looked nothing like the designs Jha had
presented. Indeed, they were hideous. There is always a gap between
a manufacturer's sketches and the eventual prototype, but Rubin and
his team had so much faith in Jha that they expected him to deliver
a phone much closer to the one he had pitched. Despair set in. "It
looked like a weapon. It was so sharp and jagged and full of hard
lines. It looked like you could cut yourself on the edges," says
someone who saw the prototype. "We were really concerned. There
were a lot of conversations where we asked, 'Is this really the
device we want to do? Should we try to talk Motorola out of
it?'"

The implications of cancelling the project were huge. Another
dud, right on the heels of the disappointing G1, might cement the
public's perception of Android as a flop. Executives at Verizon,
who had agreed to serve as the phone's exclusive carrier, would
look inept. They were still taking heat for passing on the iPhone.
Apple had gone to AT&T instead,
signing an exclusive deal and bringing in millions of new
customers. And a failure would probably mean the end of Motorola,
the company that invented the mobile phone. "There was a lot riding
on it," Rubin says. "I was betting my career on it."

A sense of doom pervaded the whole summer. Google engineers
worried the phone wouldn't sell but still found themselves working
weekends and holidays to develop the software. Jha spoke almost
every day to John Stratton, Verizon Communications' chief marketing
officer at the time, trying to figure out a way to tweak the design
without having to re-engineer all the electronic components.
Meanwhile, they were facing a November deadline.

And the phone still didn't have a name. McCann, Verizon's ad
agency, had come up with a list of possibilities -- including
Dynamite -- that few liked. As late as September, the phone still
went by its codename, Shoals. Stratton got in touch with McGarry
Bowen, a young ad agency known for its unconventional approach. "We
told them they had a week," said someone who was involved in the
discussions. "A few days later, cofounder Gordon Bowen comes back
and says, 'What do you think when I say Droid?'"

In retrospect, what the agency had done was simple: it turned
the phone's menacing looks into its biggest asset by marketing it
as an anti-iPhone. The iPhone was smooth and refined, so they would
pitch the Droid as rough and ready for work. The iPhone's
electronics and software were inaccessible, so they'd market the
phone's hackability. "If there'd been a phone in the movie Black
Hawk Down, it would have looked like the Droid," Bowen told the
executives.

A few weeks later, in early October 2009, Verizon and its new
agency presented the Droid campaign to a group of 200 Android
staffers. One ad featured stealth bombers dropping phones on a
farm, in the woods and by the side of a road. Another attacked the
iPhone as a "digitally clueless beauty-pageant queen". A third
listed all the things the Droid could do that the iPhone couldn't.
When they were over, the room erupted in applause. The Android team
had been demoralised, but "when they decided they were going to do
this full-on attack on the iPhone -- that we were going to war --
we got really excited," says an Android employee.